Archive for the ‘tutorial’ Category

WordPress index.html vs index.php struggle

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Usually when we make wordpress websites we don’t really want people to see the website in the making – so we create an index.html splash page with “under construction” or something of that sort and then we go back to tweaking index.php

Well for a while now (since wordpress 2.7) that’s not really possible because if you access www.mydomain.com it’ll in fact show the splash page, but when you go to www.mydomain.com/index.php it’ll also redirect itself to that splash index.html file.
All the other wordpress pages and permalinks work, but without the main page it’s kinda hard to edit now isn’t it?

I was searching for an answer for a LONG time and it turns out there is one.
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/9203 – here it is. If it’s all black magic to you or you’re just lazy (who isn’t?) I’ll simply tell you what to do :

Go to wp-includes folder on your server, find the canonical.php file and then find a line that goes something like that:

$redirect['path'] = preg_replace('|/index.php/*?$|', '/', $redirect['path']);

and replace it with

$redirect['path'] = preg_replace('|/index.php/$|', '/', $redirect['path']);

It’s just removing two characters but the result is a working splash page and a working index.php

Ain’t it just great?

Photoshop quick tip – how to fake HDR

Monday, December 6th, 2010


To achieve a HDR-kinda look you can either play with RAW images, various software, filters or do a similar effect MUCH much easier. See how.

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Photoshop quick tip #1 : Autoalign of elements

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Many of us might actually miss that because it’s not an option often used in tutorials online and the “snap to objects” function is used quite a lot in photoshop as well. But let’s imagine we have a couple of text fields and we want to align them vertically or horizontally together. Well we can do that with a set of these tools, the icons should be pretty much self-explanatory as it allows you to either align the baselines or centers of objects and it shows which kind of alignment each icon represents. Go and try those out!

Photoshop tutorial – light trails / curved beams

Friday, March 12th, 2010

Screen shot 2010-03-11 at 21.02.10

Today I’ll show you how to create those ubiquitous light trails or as I think of them “curved beams of light” that can either go around a character or be just in the front looking like “light painting”. We will create the image above and it will take about 10 minutes to do so because it’s all about the PEN tool in photoshop. If you don’t really know how to use the pen tool then find a tutorial that shows you the basics of the tool before you proceed.

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Tutorial: Stylish blue Grunge + Gradient background in Photoshop

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

Screen shot 2010-02-21 at 22.42.45

Here’s a quick little tutorial showing how to make a combination of gradient and grunge that can look stylish in any color (blue is just an example, feel free to experiment). What you need to know is only the basic tools of photoshop that are available from the left toolbar. And some basic layer skills (blending modes, opacities). This tutorial ALSO works in Pixelmator and works exactly the same so you can duplicate all the steps. Enjoy!

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Flash gradient mask / reflection tutorial using actionscript 2.0

Friday, February 19th, 2010

ball4

Ok, you’ve probably always wondered, why photoshop and other apps (like pixelmator for example) allow you to use gradient masks and Flash doesn’t? You probably blamed it on some vector mambo-jumbo and decided to live with it somehow. Well that’s not needed anymore, because with some clever techniques we can achieve this effect in Flash from version 8 and up. It works in actionscript 2.0, but it should be easy to achieve in 3.0 as well. This is a simple, quick effect that we can make having a basketball and it’s reflection underneath. What’s cool is that you can also animate the mask so the ball will bounce for example.
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Rotate and duplicate photoshop tutorial

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

A quick little tutorial for photoshop this time (sorry, doesn’t work in pixelmator yet, but let’s hope they add this function in some time as well).
Here’s what we’re gonna do with just one shape, without manually rotating and positioning them.
Screen shot 2010-02-11 at 01.26.13 2
Read more to find out how we do it!
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Tutorial : Fake 3d in Pixelmator and Photoshop

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Screen shot 2010-01-31 at 21.36.16

Here’s a quick little tutorial on how to make some fake-3d objects like cubes, book-shapes, dvd covers, cd cases and more. Those simple shapes can be recreated in Pixelmator (and photoshop since all the functions are exactly the same) easily. Then we can texture them and make them look a little bit more real. Sure with a lot of work they can be real, but the purpose of this tutorial is to create a more cartoonish-style fake 3d + we’re low on time ;)
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Pixelmator tutorial – emboss and brushed metal

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Screen shot 2010-01-21 at 21.03.57

Here’s a quick little tutorial on how to create an emboss + brushed metal + some fire effect in pixelmator. This will actually work in photoshop as well since the tools used are the same (even the same keyboard shortcuts). So if you’re a photoshop user feel free to also try it.

So here we go :
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Pixelmator tutorial : making a promo visual

Friday, January 15th, 2010

final

Here’s a little tutorial for pixelmator, since I’m working on some new visuals for the upcoming second promo EP from Krop. So let’s start shall we ? All you need for this tutorial are basic pixelmator or photoshop skills, a copy of pixelmator, about 20 minutes and a photo of a person. I used one of the promo pics from Krop. Read more for the tutorial itself. If any of the images is too small for you, you can right click on it, and choose view image opening it in it’s full. This release is an upcoming one, but if you like electronic dance music with an alternative twist check out the last cd at kropband.com . It’s a free download.
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